The Trump-Putin Meeting and the Fate of the Earth The Trump-Putin Meeting and the Fate of the Earth

Any truthful way to say it will sound worse than ghastly: We live in a world where one person could decide to begin a nuclear war — quickly killing several hundred million people and condemning vast numbers of others to slower painful deaths.

Given the macabre insanity of this ongoing situation, most people don’t like to talk about it or even think about it. In that zone of denial, U.S. news media keep detouring around a crucial reality: No matter what you think of Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin, they hold the whole world in their hands with a nuclear button.

If the presidents of the United States and Russia spiral into escalating conflicts between the two countries, the world is much more likely to blow up. Yet many American critics of Trump have gotten into baiting him as Putin’s flunky while goading him to prove otherwise. A new barrage of that baiting and goading is now about to begin — taking aim at any wisps of possible détente — in connection with the announced meeting between Trump and Putin at the G-20 summit in Germany at the end of this week.

Big picture: This moment in human history is not about Trump. It’s not about Putin. It’s not about whether you despise either or neither or both. What’s at stake in the dynamics between them is life on this planet.

Over the weekend, more than 10,000 people signed a petition under the heading “Tell Trump and Putin: Negotiate, Don’t Escalate.” The petition was written by RootsAction to be concise and to the point:

“We vehemently urge you to take a constructive approach to your planned meeting at the G-20 summit. Whatever our differences, we must reduce rather than increase the risks of nuclear war. The future of humanity is at stake.”

A war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers could extinguish human life on a gigantic scale while plunging the Earth into cataclysmic “nuclear winter.”

“Recent scientific studies have found that a war fought with the deployed U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals would leave Earth virtually uninhabitable,” wroteSteven Starr, a senior scientist with Physicians for Social Responsibility. “In fact, NASA computer models have shown that even a ‘successful’ first strike by Washington or Moscow would inflict catastrophic environmental damage that would make agriculture impossible and cause mass starvation.”

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists explains why, since last year, it has moved the risk-estimate “Doomsday Clock” even closer to apocalyptic midnight — citing as a major factor the escalation of tensions between the U.S. and Russian governments.

So, the imminent meeting between Trump and Putin will affect the chances that the young people we love — and so many others around the world — will have a future. And whether later generations will even exist.

“Whatever the truth may be about Russian interference in the U.S. election last year, an overarching truth continues to bind the fates of Russians, Americans and the rest of humanity. No matter how much we might wish to forget or deny it, we are tied together by a fraying thread of relations between two nations that possess 93 percent of the world’s nuclear weapons. Right now it is not popular to say so, but we desperately need each other to enhance the odds of human survival.”

In that overall context, stoking hostility toward Russia is, uh, rather short-sighted. Wouldn’t it be much better for the meeting between Trump and Putin to bring Washington and Moscow closer to détente rather than bringing us closer to nuclear annihilation?

Norman Solomon is the coordinator of the online activist group RootsAction.organd the executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. He is the author of a dozen books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.”

Licensed under Creative Commons. The original source of this article is CounterPunch.

Box

Videos

Farmageddon - The truth about the food and dairy industry
9/11 - Press for Truth (full movie)
Iraq For Sale - Full Movie
Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine
The American Dream Film-Full Length
America: A Government Out of Control
Police State 4: The Rise Of FEMA
‘Fall of the Republic’
The New rulers of The World
The Israel Lobby
HOME
American Drug War:The Last Hope
ROMERO Full Movie
Nicaragua - A Nations Right To Survive

Blog Stats

312,181 hits

disclaimer

Counter Information published all articles following the Creative Commons rule. If you don't want your article to appear in this blog email me and I will remove it asap.

Follow Blog via Email

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Visiting a website could make you a subpoena target by: Alfredo Lopez If the U.S. Department of Justice prevails in a case against web-hosting provider Dreamhost, you can become the subject of a criminal investigation by visiting a website. You don't have to re-read that. The problem is not with your eyes; it's with your government. If the court […]

Charlottesville awakening by: Dave Lindorff I grew up in Storrs, Connecticut, a faculty brat in a university town where minority people were few and far between. There were a few black kids in our high school — the children of people employed at UConn. There were also working-class Puerto Ricans in the area — American citizens but who knew that back then? […]

Whitewashing Racism Again by: Linn Washington Jr. Bench on porch at the White House of Donald Trump? No. Apartheid-era artifact in Cape Town, South Africa. LBWPhoto U.S. President Donald Trump is a bigot – ’bigley’ – to use a word that he’s used frequently! Trump is a bigot as defined as someone who doesn’t tolerate people of different races or religions! […]

Government climate scientists take action by: Dave Lindorff Embattled climate scientists working in 13 various US government agencies threw down the gauntlet before the Trump administration by releasing, to the New York Times, an over 600-page report on climate change in the US, the work of several years intended to comply with a Congressional requirement […]

Writing in No-Man's-Land by: John Grant The attitude of the great poets is to cheer up slaves and horrify despots -Walt Whitman To comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable -Traditional adage of journalistic purpose These days, adjusting to Donald J. Trump as “leader of the free world,” I find myself defending The New Y […]

[audio mp3="http://www.corbettreport.com/mp3/2017-08-17%20James%20Corbett.mp3"][/audio]James Corbett appears on The Gary Null Show for a detailed conversation on the history, function, and future of The Federal Reserve system. James and Gary discuss the history of the Fed as detailed in Century of Enslavement: The History of the Federal Reserve, di […]

The universe is the internet is the library is the internet is the universe. Or is it? And if so, who are the librarians? And if we have all the information we can ever want, does that mean we have knowledge or wisdom? If not, how do we make it? Or who will make it for us? Join James this month for a Film, Literature and the New World Order examination of “T […]

With Google's outrageous moves toward censorship increasingly in the news, perhaps it's time to review the history of Google's censorship, spying and governmental collusion. Join James for this classic Eyeopener report from 2012 about how Google's real motto should be "Just Be Evil."